A clinical trial of Turkovac Phase-3 conducted with the participation of 1,290 volunteers under the leadership of Hacettepe University's Faculty of Medicine published its successful results that also caught the attention of one of the world's prestigious scientific journals Vaccines.

Turkovac Phase-3 study principal investigator Dr. Mine Durusu Tanrıöver said: "The study revealed that Turkovac is effective and safe for people who have not been vaccinated and have never had COVID-19 before. The findings were obtained from the clinical study. Its interim results were first announced on Jan. 12. The study was conducted through the long-term follow-up of 915 volunteers aged 18-55, healthy and without serious diseases.

"In this process, 1,290 people who declared that they did not have COVID-19 and were not vaccinated were randomly divided into two groups. Each group was administered two doses of CoronaVac or two doses of Turkovac 28 days apart. They then received followed up checkups for symptoms. In addition, 732 volunteers for whom the main efficacy analysis was appropriate were followed for 90 days. In terms of safety, a longer follow-up was performed on a total of 915 people as a wider group."

"As a result, Turkovac provided a relative risk reduction of 41% compared to CoronaVac in terms of the development of COVID-19 diagnosed by PCR. With this finding, it was evaluated that Turkovac was at least as effective as CoronaVac during the follow-up period of the study," said Tanrıöver.

In addition, along with the variants that have been in circulation for a while, the focus is on keeping the COVID-19 vaccines at the forefront of protecting the vaccinated people from severe diseases. In this study, no COVID-19 cases that required hospitalization or had a severe course of 14 days after the second dose of the vaccine were encountered.

Turkovac is a domestic vaccine developed in cooperation with Erciyes University and the Ministry of Health's Turkish Health Institutes Presidency (TÜSEB). It received emergency use approval on Dec. 22, 2021, after the completion of the Phase-1, Phase-2 and Phase-3 testing.

The vaccine, which started mass production on the same day and became widely available in a short time, making Türkiye one of the nine countries in the world that can produce its own vaccine against COVID-19.